Near my house there is a garden, beneath whose stately sycamores a fountain plays.  Three sculptured girls lift forever upward a chalice which distils unceasingly a fine and plashing rain; in summer the spray holds the maidens in a glittering veil, but winter takes the radiant drops and slowly builds them up into a shroud of ice which creeps gradually about the three slight figures:  the feet vanish, the waist is encircled, the head is covered, the piteous uplifted arms disappear, as if each were a Vestal Virgin entombed alive for her transgression.  They vanishing entirely, the fountain yet plays on unseen; all winter the pile of ice grows larger, glittering organ-pipes of congelation add themselves outside, and by February a great glacier is formed, at whose buried centre stand immovably the patient girls.  Spring comes at last, the fated prince, to free with glittering spear these enchanted beauties; the waning glacier, slowly receding, lies conquered before their liberated feet; and still the fountain plays.  Who can despair before the iciest human life, when its unconscious symbols are so beautiful?

A STORY OF TO-DAY.

PART V.

There was a dull smell of camphor; a further sense of coolness and prickling wet on Holmes’s hot, cracking face and hands; then silence and sleep again.  Sometime—­when, he never knew—­a gray light stinging his eyes like pain, and again a slow sinking into warm, unsounded darkness and unconsciousness.  It might be years, it might be ages.  Even in after-life, looking back, he never broke that time into weeks or days:  people might so divide it for him, but he was uncertain, always:  it was a vague vacuum in his memory:  he had drifted out of coarse, measured life into some out-coast of eternity, and slept in its calm.  When, by long degrees, the shock of outer life jarred and woke him, it was feebly done:  he came back reluctant, weak:  the quiet clinging to him, as if he had been drowned in Lethe, and had brought its calming mist with him, out of the shades.

The low chatter of voices, the occasional lifting of his head on the pillow, the very soothing draught, came to him, unreal at first:  parts only of the dull, lifeless pleasure.  There was a sharper memory pierced it sometimes, making him moan and try to sleep,—­a remembrance of great, cleaving pain, of falling giddily, of owing life to some one, and being angry that he owed it, in the pain.  Was it he that had borne it?  He did not know,—­nor care:  it made him tired to think.  Even when he heard the name Stephen Holmes, it had but a far-off meaning:  he never woke enough to know if it were his or not.  He learned, long after, to watch the red light curling among the shavings in the grate when they made a fire in the evenings, to listen to the voices of the women by the bed, to know that the pleasantest belonged to the one with the low, shapeless figure, and to call her Lois when he wanted a drink, long before he knew himself.